NPR Story

4:52 am

Tue October 16, 2012

Manufacturers Financially Support Hiring Vets

And four major manufacturers say they will start offering financial support for the training of military veterans. The corporations are taking part in a program called Get Skills to Work Coalition. It has said its initial goal at training 15,000 vets.

NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.

YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Unemployment among veterans has been falling, as it has for everyone else. The jobless rate among vets serving after 2001 now stands at 9.7 percent, but that's still about 2 percentage points higher than the general population.

GE and Boeing, along with Alcoa and Lockheed-Martin, will bankroll training for vets at a technical community college in Cincinnati, Ohio, with plans to roll out to seven new cities as well. The program will be managed by the Manufacturing Institute and will include technical as well as on-the-job training.

There are about one million veterans expected to leave the armed forces in the next four years, and their military separation comes as manufacturers say they need more skilled workers to man higher-tech factories. Many veterans have faced a difficult time landing private-sector jobs soon after they separate from the military. But, the data suggest that as those veterans age, they tend to stay employed. And older veterans actually have a lower unemployment rate than their civilian counterparts.